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I heard that if you ask Deepseek R1 about the Ukraine war in English, it'll give you the US story. If you ask in Russian, it puts on it's Z-armband and give the Russian story. But then R1 is not AGI.
Also, consider historiography. There is no way to turn an enormous depth of known facts into a narrative without simplifying or taking some kind of perspective. You can't give 'what actually happened' without boring your audience senseless, you need to identify the salient facts. There can be more or less true narratives of course but a universal narrative is very, very hard to swallow.
Of course which reinforces my strongly held belief in linguistic determinism. Languages reflect reality only to the extent that they can describe it and their description of reality is likewise shaped/reinforced by the language it's parsed in.
On the other hand I'm imagining a general AI that could be fed infinite realtime data from infinite cameras, microphones and news sources from all over the world, it would inevitably start to bleed its understanding outside of the frame of one context and synthesize all of its input feeds into some universalist perspective that would be outside the realm of understanding of any one person who brings their own specific context to any information (as universalist as they may attempt to be or imagine themselves to be.)
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This is obvious and expected behavior. The training data for generating russian language will naturally consist of russian language sources, english of english sources, french french, etc...
Agreed. And that highlights a contradiction in the original post
The second sentence, with its "than ever before", is a nod to LLMs. But while LLMs are obviously intelligent, it is not the kind of intelligence that we were hoping for. LLMs flip between the different narratives that the blind men have written about the elephant. The LLMs do not have their own perspective on the elephant. They haven't felt it. They don't have hands. They don't even know that there is an elephant, or that what people say about the elephant ought to agree (because it is an elephant (real), not a unicorn(fictional). They just know that there are lots of words about elephants and how to generate more of the same.
There is a least one big breakthrough still to come before General Artificial Intelligence. If there are two big breakthroughs needed, the period in between them, will be fascinating/fraught. Half the world will believe AI's uncritically, half the world will notice that AI still isn't quite here yet,...
I agree with you with regards to just LLMs, but I was imagining more of a general AI in the future which would be fed infinite streams of data in every language and place on earth that would lead to some singularity or consolidation of worldviews and perspectives impossible to individual humans.
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